224 | PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
clude are largely indebted to a tradition of European and North American
research on Islam—and indeed everything else herein discussed. But the par-
ticularity of the tradition is conspicuous in the case of Islam, since on this
subject there is a parallel tradition in the Muslim world. Western scholars’
attention to this tradition is rarely very extensive, while contemporary Mus-
lim scholarship in “Muslim” languages often ignores its Western counterpart
or treats it with suspicion—see now Jacob Lassner’s Jews, Christians, and the
abode of Islam: Modern scholarship, medieval realities (2012). This is not to
deny that the Muslim tradition has been considerably influenced, whether
positively or reactively, by the West’s more general secularism, rationalism
and so forth. A thoughtful recent book by Thomas Bauer, Die Kultur der
Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams (2011), draws attention to the
way in which Muslim fundamentalist rejection of traditionally acceptable
polysemy and ambiguity in the Qurʾān and elsewhere, in favor of only one
meaning for each passage, is really a response to universalizing, hegemonial
Western discourse. But the Muslim scholars who are more widely and profit-
ably read in Europe and North America are those who work there and have
absorbed that way of thinking, or at least express themselves in those terms,
while often displaying a profounder acquaintance than their non- Muslim
colleagues with research published in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and so forth.
Such scholars are ever more numerous, and probably offer our best hope for
combining traditional and contemporary Muslim thought with the wide ho-
rizons imposed by the global turn in Western research.